Devices for extracting juice from a cut-half of a lime, lemon, or other citrus fruit are well-known and come in a wide variety of configurations. In a most basic form, a bowl includes reamer that is fixed in position and projects upwardly from a central region of the bowl. A user manually grasps the exterior skin or rind of the cut-half of fruit and engages the pulp or flesh of the fruit with the reamer with a pressing, grinding, and rotating operation such that juice is extracted from the fruit and collects in the bowl. In another variation, the bowl is omitted and the reamer is hand-held, and the user engages the reamer with the pulp of the fruit over a separate bowl or other container to collect the juice. In both cases, the devices do not provide any mechanical advantage to the user, and the operation of the reamer is uneven and inconsistent, with less than all of the available juice being extracted.
In another variety of juicer, the cut-half of fruit is crushed between a fixed (non-rotating) reamer and a cup-shaped member that engages the outer rind of the fruit and urges the pulp of the fruit into engagement with the reamer. In one version of such a device, the reamer and cup-shaped member are connected to respective arms or jaws that are pivotally connected to each other, and the user grips handles of the respective jaws with one or two hands and squeezes the jaws together to complete the fruit crushing operation. Such hand-held citrus crushing devices have been found to be ineffective and inefficient in extracting juice due to the inability of users to sufficiently crush the fruit and due to the unidirectional nature of the crushing operation without any rotating of the fruit or reamer relative to each other. In other version of such a device, the device is countertop mounted and includes a lever or rotating handle that is moved by the user to move the respective jaws together, in which case a linkage can be provided between the lever/handle and the jaws to provide a mechanical advantage. Such counter-top devices more completely crush the fruit, but still suffer from the lack of a structure for providing relative rotation between the reamer and the fruit. These counter-top devices are also too large and expensive for home use, and are difficult to clean.
Other citrus juicing devices include an electrically powered motor that drives a rotating reamer that is located above or otherwise adjacent a container that collects the extracted juice. A user manually presses the pulp of the cut-half of fruit into engagement with the motor-driven rotating reamer while the extracted juice is collected in the container. A primary disadvantage of these devices is that they are more expensive to purchase, require electrical power to operate, are more difficult to clean, and do not fit in a standard home drawer or are otherwise bulky to store when not in use.
In light of the foregoing, a need has been identified for a hand-held manual (non-electrically powered) citrus juicing device or “juicer” for extracting juice from a cut-half of a lemon, lime, or other citrus fruit in an effective and efficient manner, while still being easy to clean and convenient to store.